Read a portion of this to pass time on a road trip. By mysticism, Russell doesn't mean writers like Theresa of Avila but "univocal" philosophers like Heraclitus and Spinoza. It's fun to think about these writers since I'm a big fan of that kind of philosophizing, but Russell's analyses tend mostly towards banality and sometimes towards myopia. Russell's writing is horribly aristocratic, a bit racist, naively or pompously scientistic, speckled with meaningless sentences (surprisingly many for a self-professed logical atomist)... Dessicated reading, presumably meant only for wannabe magistrates and sons of prime ministers. State Philosophy at its stateliest. blech ( )

12/11/21